"Sicko"

I am not a big cryer. Horribly sensitive, yes, but I don't cry a whole lot. Maybe it stems from the time I was 7 and my sister took me to see Snoopy, Come Home. She swears I bawled my eyes out the whole time because I thought Snoopy was going to live with Lila and not go back to Charlie Brown. (I don't remember that, by the way.) I don't even think I cried at Old Yeller.

Periodically, though, something will get to me. Even though it was more or less fiction, I found myself wiping away tears at the end of "Rudy." The final episode of "Frasier," where he decides to leave Seattle for a job and then ends up following his heart instead, has me sobbing every time, though that's largely because at one point he quotes part of a Tennyson poem that has always cut straight to my core. (Alfie knew something about grief and depression, I assure you.)

I just finished watching Michael Moore's "Sicko." It came out a couple years ago, I know -- that's my typical timetable for catching movies. And yeah, I know Michael Moore skews things, etc. It's kind of the nature of the beast: You can't really piece together endless hours of footage into a coherent story unless you purposely choose the story you want to tell. But man -- to see how people with chronic health issues get treated elsewhere (he went to Canada, France and Britain) -- and then when he took the 9/11 workers to Gitmo and they got phenomenal treatment, for free -- it hit home. I run up a LOT of medical bills. I am one hundred and thirty-two percent uninsurable, in the American system, because I have eleventy-billion pre-existing conditions. And yet, in the rest of the civilized world, I wouldn't have to worry about any of it. And yeah, this weighs on me a lot, especially as I've now been without insurance for several months and I am tired of burdening the free clinic in town, which is always filled to overflowing every time I'm there (which lately has been weekly).

The other thing that made me cry is that during the end credits, when he was running the "thanks to" part, he thanked Kurt Vonnegut "for everything." Kurt's anniversary is coming up fast here. I miss the hell out of him too.

'k, all done -- no more tears/whining, time for a jaunt to Gordy's for some ice cream, I think. ;-)

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